Calling Out

CALLING OUT Three feet above your head, the air is thick with spirits. Vincent’s crow as black as inarticulate sleep; Ambrose and the beehive rumbling the dither of dream; Dunstan with the Devil by the nose; Faith on a bed of iron, a bed of iron; the fountains springing from the blood of Boniface: Florentius and the bear that guards his flock; Severus at the weaver’s loom. And Varus with his flail, with his flail. She is calling out the names of the saints in her sleep, that numb rehearsal, that nimbus that tethers her to her corpse in the dark. Uncovered and cold, this body’s not hers: this supple pillar of neck, the shoulders sloping to Gethsemane and her breasts crowned by golden aureoles, those haloes of the flesh. What is gone and what is here when the relics of muscle and memory rest? The raven air tumescent in her ears, twisting through her throat, a rolling fog that follows every rise of skin and fills this earthen vessel like a withered arm resides within the velvet of a reliquary. This is all that is left: bone and jerked sinew in a silver case. This is all that has fled: the name, the knowing, the familiar face.

Joseph Allgren ©2009